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Making Engineering Relevant through University/High School Student Collaboration
by Jim Vanides

In my last blog posting, “Making Science Relevant: A Success Story from California”, I mentioned how High School students were working with Middle School students. Because this is critically important, I’m happy to bring you another example, this time with undergraduate engineering students sharing the joy of “design” with local high school students...

The project is led by California State University, Fresno, and is known as the Distributed Computational Design Environment (DiCoDE) project. The project was funded by a 2009 HP Innovations in Education Grant. The goal  is to bring critical thinking and problem solving into the local high school curriculum. Led by Dr. Rahul Rai (Lyles College of Engineering), his secret weapon is his undergraduate engineering students. The bottom line: the high school students get to experience something they would never have experienced before, they learn how engineering design is relevant (and interesting!), plus the participating undergraduates learn by teaching.

The experience is situated in “Saturday Academies”, as shown in their 5 minute video:
 

What’s so important about this model?

• It’s a win-win for all students (high school and undergraduate)

• It makes high school science and math relevant

• Mobile technology makes it easy to bring the tools of engineering to your local high school

Fantastic. If you've heard of other examples like this, please let me know! (Send me a tweet @jgvanides)

Great job, CSU Fresno!